


Sekibanki I

by Reavski



Series: Sekibanki [1]
Category: Touhou Project
Genre: F/M, Internal Conflict, POV Female Character, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:22:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27711302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reavski/pseuds/Reavski
Summary: Sekibanki likes drink, but not company. Why, then, does she find herself time and again in the company of a certain man? What allies a furtive youkai with a nameless human?
Series: Sekibanki [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026787
Kudos: 4





	Sekibanki I

Sekibanki was squinting through the clear bottom of her tankard. The last golden droplets gathered on its edge. She briefly deliberated going for another round soon.

When she lowered the glass, and looked on who sat opposite at her table, she deliberated going even sooner.

The taproom air was viscous with smoke. Three or four braziers, spaced among the crowded drinking tables, filled it with both warmth and a stink of burnt resin. The pine wood must have been fresh from the forest. The air was thick with other things as well – talk one of them, and some pitiful twanging in a corner of the room another – yet these Sekibanki had dismissed as beyond what little care she nursed. The heaters too, but what comfort they gave in this wintry season she quietly appreciated. A faint sigh whispered between Sekibanki’s lips. She had been attempting to negotiate the remains of her drink down the tall wall of the tankard, but the trail dried about half-way, and the only taste she was awarded was of disappointment. At last she put it down, in her mind’s heart reaching a weary decision. She shuffled to a stand.

The man opposite of her caught the motion by the tail. An unassuming face raised her a questioning brow.

For one more instant he did not speak. Only once Sekibanki was free of her chair did a slightly accented voice issue into the din of the taproom.

“Done?”

A monosyllabic query was presented. Sekibanki turned her head left and right a fraction. Her neck itched.

“One more,” she said. Her eyes slid down to the table, to the man’s unfinished drink. He had two, maybe three sips to go. “You?”

The man followed her gaze. He picked up his tankard and downed it in one. Then he breathed his reply.

“Sure.”

Sekibanki sketched a nod. She squeezed past their nearest neighbours, and headed for the bar. The hour was later than propriety recommended, but even this did not relieve the drink-house from the attention of souls who had stored their propriety back at home. _And who’s talking?_ Sekibanki asked herself this inside. There was no reply (not yet anyway), and she made the way to her destination wanting senseless conversation. Of this much, she was glad.

The barkeep was a typical specimen of his ilk, ox-shouldered and cursed forever to chew on something in the side of his mouth. He measured the red-headed girl with a curt question, “What’ll be?” and Sekibanki ordered two servings of the bitter local ale.

As the drinks were poured, she dared a sweep sideways at the room. Nobody was staring in her direction. Almost she released a tiny smile of relief. Almost. She kept the corners of her lips from quirking up by scratching at her neck with one hand. Her collar was damp with sweat.

She exchanged a few coins from her purse for the new tankards, and, somewhat lighter of step, went on to torment the other customers with a second passing. She arrived at her table without a disaster, and presented one of the glasses to her companion. Then she sat down, marking only the tiniest nod of gratitude before committing to her own drink. She wetted her throat, swallowed, and exhaled the hoppy fumes. She instantly felt better.

They didn’t talk, like the others were at volume all around. They _never did_.

 _Well, that isn’t entirely true_ , thought Sekibanki. _I asked him just then, and he replied. That counts for talk, doesn’t it?_ A moment came and passed that she toyed with the idea of keeping count from here on out, but it was one borne of foolishness. The man dedicated his silence to his own mental exercise, and Sekibanki – to hers. This was their arrangement. This was what they had judged for the best. Time had not changed it. Nor would it. Not tonight. Not likely ever.

Time.

 _How long has this been going on now?_ she questioned herself, staring emptily sideward from their table. A few weeks at the least… perhaps a month? Three? More? Tracking the passage of days came a difficult thing to an ageless thing such as she, and the years (or were they?) of living disguised among these people had not disabused Sekibanki of this falling. Only the regular festivities the Human Village so adored stayed her time from blending into a formless dream. Too often had the quiet red-headed townswoman woken in the pale hours of the morning to hear another holy-day date arrived outside the window. Too often had she found it eerily close to the previous.

Still she had attended each. Still she had stood each day and joined the hamlet life of these people for whom she felt no kinship. Once, she had still questioned why. That time was now a thing of history. This much even the calendar-immune Sekibanki could say for certain.

 _So how long?_ The question returned, with a nagging she would have thought reserved for greater boredom. Their current meeting – hers and her companion’s – was definitely yet another in a venerable sequence, but which one was an utter mystery, not least because nearly all of them were twin to one another. They met, they annexed a table, drank with their own thoughts, then retired to their homes. This routine had aged enough by now to develop an unspoken agreement on which paid for the drinks on this or that night, and Sekibanki had welcomed the freedom to partake of alcohol at another’s expense every other week. This, of course, was a poor illusion – their tab would be balanced no sooner than her turn came to act the sponsor, but she had enjoyed it all the same. It proved mysteriously comfortable.

None of that, however, was the actual reason for their queer compact. That had been a simpler matter by half.

Sekibanki _despised_ company.

To be more precise what she despised was the clumsy fraternising of humans. _Singularly_ , she loathed the invasive attentions of their male half. So then, why was it that her current company was not only a human, but worse yet – very plainly of the less fair gender? This Sekibanki could answer easily were anyone to pose this situation before her (nobody did anyway), and the answer was simplicity itself.

Nobody bothered a girl in the ostensive attendance of a man.

This, perhaps obvious, technicality of social configuration had allowed her to spend many an evening over a drink – drink served cold, unlike at her home – spared the niggling attentions of men looking to acquaint this strange, but at once striking, red-headed young woman. Those men looked away, even now. The quiet, odd-spoken one across the table insured this much.

 _He had a name_ , Sekibanki reminded herself. _What was it?_ He must have given it as some point, but there was no instance of it in Sekibanki’s memory. _Small matter. He butchered mine anyway._ The man had only addressed her by name once, and the name had come out as “Seki.” Not that he’d curtailed it. That had been the extent to which he’d heard it, from those few villagers who’d for some unknowable end committed her to heart. Sekibanki could not guess at why.

Yet even had she inquired around after this one’s name, she nurtured no doubt she would have run against a wall. The man opposite of her was a _stranger_. An _outlander_. Some may venture _intruder_. Those from beyond the Great Barrier who had stumbled inside were as a rule returned peaceably at a request to the shrine maiden of Hakurei or the crone Yakumo – but still every rule had its exceptions. Those determined to remain were made into a better or worse addition to the Human Village’s workforce. This one – this man who sometimes paid for Sekibanki’s drinks – was just such an instance. Or was he?

 _No. Another exception_ , Sekibanki remembered. _This one doesn’t fit in. Why, he reminds me of someone else I could name…_ This man, unlike those come in precedence, had made no attempt to assimilate into this new commune to which he had, perhaps not entirely consciously, surrendered the remainder of his hourglass lifespan. This man spoke his accented tongue with the tenacity of someone after preservation work, and granted very few the opportunity to corrupt it.

To his imaginable relief, very few tried in the first place.

Nor had Sekibanki. Their first meeting had seen no more than a few sentences spoken, and rather out of courtesy than anything else which might have been imagined. “This seat free?” “Why do you ask?” “Mind you?” “Go ahead.” “Sorry if I’m quiet.” “No, it’s fine.” There would have been nothing exceptional about it either, had Sekibanki not marked an acute waning in the number of attempts at conversation from neighbouring regulars. The chance, against all odds, had turned out a discreet blessing, and Sekibanki, in a rare moment of enthusiasm, counted out seven Sun-dawns, after which she walked down to the taproom once more. In an amusing reversal, she was the one inquiring after the state of the seat that time.

Sekibanki sensed something like a smile oncoming at her own internal cleverness, and she sought to drown it in her drink.

The smile died all right, but not in alcoholic agony. The drink was out.

She muttered, and set her tankard back down. With a strange, confused feeling of regret she noted her companion’s glass was empty as well. _Have we learned to match our paces?_ Their gazes managed someway to cross each other, and the man glanced meaningfully to the big oaken door exiting the drink-house, then back to Sekibanki. The collar around her neck began itching again.

“Yes,” she gave a simple confirmation.

There was no response but for the screech of wood on wood as her companion stood to leave.

The night outside had adulterated into its darkest hours.

Still unspeaking but for a startled complaint of cold, Sekibanki’s drinking partner, quite on his own, began at a hurried pace in the direction of her house. The red-headed girl had offended at the idea of being _escorted_ home the first time this had happened, but the man had given her no ground to argue. “This is for my own comfort,” he had insisted. And anyway what might she do to prevent him from walking beside her? There _may_ have been a few things if one looked, but somehow – someway – Sekibanki had managed to contain those to the realm of frustrated speculation.

Soon they reached her little house near the outskirts of the village, and Sekibanki turned just in time to see the man veer off and leave in the same vague orientation he always, always did. A few moments more, and he was out of sight, vanished in a branching alley, and she could stare after him no more.

As always, there had been no goodbyes.

Once she had been delivered to her doorstep, the man’s work was as good as done. As always he took this precise moment to disappear, quicker than his presence may be marked by any eyes watching from the curtained windows. Never saying a word, never looking back. As always, before she was any wise to it, Sekibanki was once more alone on the shadowed street.

As always, Sekibanki felt _something_ stirring in her chest.

Not irritation – for she would have thrown herself into the River of the Dead before irritating at something so insubstantial – but a sense of _urgency._ A deep and barely resistible pull to do _something_ – to twist her head from her shoulders, to hurl it after this man, to hear his panicked screams, to corner him in some black, lonely dead end somewhere between the sleeping houses, and…

And…!

“… Calm down.” The voice which said it was her own. “You _can’t_. Calm down.”

Sekibanki released her breath with an effort. Her neck was _aflame._ She scratched at her collar vigorously with both hands. When she wrenched them away, there was warm meat under her fingernails.

She was shrugging out of her “outing” clothes even before the front door of her house had fully closed behind her. The darkness of her home _roused_ and came alive as more of her emerged, woken from deathlike slumber on the bed, the shelves, cupboards and floor. There were whispers in that darkness, but none other than her own starved voice. Sekibanki stamped over to the closet where she kept her measly selection of clothes, and retrieved a more appropriate set.

A shirt as tar-black as the night, and a cape as crimson-red as freshly spilled blood.

More whispers surged around her as she pulled on these work clothes, giddy all over. Whispers of anticipation. Of promise. Of _hunger_. Sekibanki flourished her cape, and the heads floating in the air loosed a howl of glee.

She span, and went for the front door. This night, people of the Human Village would be going home happy and inebriated. This night, the distance to their homes would be walked in blissful inattention to the dangers lurking just beyond the reach of light. This night, whosoever should squint hard enough and dare peer into the face of the dark, would see it staring back with a dozen blood-shot eyes.

This night, what the dark would turn out, would be a headless terror and her grisly entourage.


End file.
